Hey everybody, it’s Wes from Printful, and I’m here with Dairis, our Director of Operations.
We’re at our LA location, and holiday season is coming up.
We’re entering into Printful’s fifth holiday season,
and we now have more than 250 employees just on our fulfillment team.
And we’ve been trusted to print more that 6 million products,
so we definitely have our experience behind us coming into holiday season.
I wanted to talk to Dairis about some of the things Printful’s
doing for this year’s holiday season.
Let’s just dive right in!
Let’s go!
What are some of the basic things Printful’s doing
just to prepare for the holidays coming up?
We mainly focus on three categories.
Number one is people.
We grow our team, we start hiring and training people
way ahead of time in order for everyone to be up to speed.
Number two is inventory, stock levels.
We work with all of our suppliers in order to forecast,
to make sure that everyone’s going to have enough stock,
enough inventory of everything we need to produce.
Number three is our machinery and equipment that we use in production.
Every year we invest quite a bit of money in growing
the number of machines we have in each department and also improving the current ones, so upgrades
to existing equipment.
This year so far, only in our DTG or direct-to-garment department
we’ve invested over 6 million dollars in order to not only
get more capacity out of the current machines, obviously we’ve been purchasing additional
equipment, but also to improve the quality.
We upgraded our Kornit printers from regular Storm II printers
to Hexa printers.
And Hexa stands for six, which means six colors.
Previously we worked in a CMYK or four color environment,
now we’ve moved to a six color workspace, which allows
our clients to expand the color gamut.
To put it in simple terms - what you see on a screen
is going to match the actual physical print a lot closer
than it did before.
Each machine is able to produce by about 25-30% faster,
meaning that each operator gets 25-30% more output
by the end of the day.
The printer doesn’t look any different on the outside,
a lot of things have changed on the inside.
There are new print heads on the machine, there’s backup supply, a lot of things have
changed on the interior of the machine.
Operators definitely notice it when every single shirt is printed,
it just comes out faster, you can physically feel it.
The entire ink system is different, because it has also
added a recirculation system.
Which means - when you’re purging and wiping, which is
the process of cleaning out the nozzles, the print heads,
we’re recovering that ink.
It’s a lot less likely that the print heads are going to
get clogged and result in damages, like the most
typical one you get in digital printing, which is
when you see straight lines, which means that nozzles are missing.
With this recirculation process, it’s always cleaning them,
it’s always running ink through them, so it’s a lot less
likely that something is going to get clogged.
So operators have to spend less time doing maintenance
and they can focus on the actual process of printing the shirts.
From the marketing side of things, maybe you can tell us
some frequently asked questions what our clients are
interested in knowing before the peak season begins?
Sure, the biggest question we always get is what are the
order deadlines.
Everyone wants to know what’s the last date that
a customer can place an order or that they can sell
and still be able to get that product in time for the holidays.
That’s something we’re always looking into, we have to
contact all of our carriers, and we’re always staying
up to date with the information that they’re putting out,
so that we can calculate our fulfillment times with
the shipping deadlines, so that you can get the
product there on time.
We always post all that stuff as soon as we get the information.
It’ll be listed all over our website, we’ll do a blog post.
So just make sure to do things like turn on your email
notifications to make sure that you’re being notified
and get that information.
We’ll also blast it all over our social media, so it’s pretty
hard to miss the order deadlines when we’re able to get those out.
There’s lots of practical things that our clients can do,
simple things, like making sure that your payment
methods are all up to date, that you don’t have any
expired cards on your ecommerce platforms.
So that way there’s not an issue with any of the payment
systems when the orders start coming in.
You can always make sure that your products are synced.
You don’t want an increase in all these orders and then find out
that one of them actually isn’t synced and now there’s
lots of manual work you have to do.
Site speed is actually a huge deterrent on sales.
So you want to check out whoever’s hosting your website.
Some of them, if you’re using WooCommerce, for example,
you’ve had to get your own hosting plan, so you might want to make sure to upgrade
or anything like that if you expect to have an increase
in visitors to your store.
Because you don’t want it to be the Black Friday rush,
everyone’s checking out your site for sales, and
then your site crashes or freezes.
So you can always look into things like that as well.
Another thing you can do is go ahead and start planning
out as soon as possible what kind of deals or specials
you’re going to run for the holiday season.
Black Friday every single year continues to grow
and just be the biggest spending day in history.
Every year that gets topped.
The more prepared you are as far as that goes, the more successful the holiday season in
terms of sales is gonna go for you.
I wanted to ask you real quick - when I was talking about updates for your
site and making things current,
what are some products if a customer’s looking to add
seasonal products?
What’s a good one, or a couple that you know
that increase during the holiday season?
All the product categories grow during the peak season,
but there are some that grow more.
For example, mugs.
Normally we need to produce around four to five times more mugs every single
day during peak season compared to the regular
season.
So mugs are definitely a very popular one.
Socks also grow quite rapidly during the peak season,
we see a spike there.
And sweaters.
Pretty much everything that makes you warm during
the cold Christmas time.
Beanies?
Yes, beanies.
Beanies also become quite popular when compared to the regular season.
And for anyone in the Southern hemisphere?
It’s going to be summer for these holidays.
So you could totally take advantage of holiday, print on
stuff like our swimsuits, beach towels and things like that.
And you can actually improve your sales just by
having fun like that as far as that goes, staying relevant to your customer base.
Dairis, thank you so much for sitting with me here today.
Everyone, we have lots of great information, tons of
blog articles just about ecommerce in general.
Especially coming up to the holiday season, lots of really great specific things to help
you out.
So be sure to subscribe to our blog.
Check out our YouTube channel because there’ll be lots of content there.
So don’t forget to subscribe as well, and check out
our other videos.